Foreword: In March 2020, Mia Shouha embarked on a three-month trip to Southeast Turkey. Mia toured the old city of Mardin and the surrounding sites that her ancestors inhabited roughly a century ago. She had heard stories growing up of how she hailed from a well-renowned Chaldean-Assyrian family from Mardin and Nusaybin and hoped to investigate this history further. The original plan of traveling through these parts for two weeks became three immersive long months when the Turkish border was closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. She split her time between the Deyrulzafaran Syriac Orthodox Monastery and the Mar Hirmiz Chaldean Church living quarters in old Mardin. Having just spent time in her father’s home city of Aleppo prior to visiting Mardin, it was shocking to consider the paths that existed between these parts through history and the great Syrian cities in the south. The fragmentation of the region looms heavily, and one can’t help but try to look for figments of nearby cities like Aleppo in Mardin. During this time, Mia lived how and where her ancestors once lived and got acquainted with the little community and echoes of the past that still remain.
View of the Jazira plains towards Syria, near the Grand Mosque (Tarihi Ulu Cami) in Mardin. Photo courtesy of Mia Shouha.
Looking out into the distance, from the old fortress city of Mardin in Turkey, perched on a hilltop overlooking the plains of Jazira that lead to Northeast Syria, the beauty is captivating. Poignantly, one begins to understand why these lands have been fought over and carved up in the name of competing armies and empires. The Jazira region, often referred to as “Upper Mesopotamia”, stretches today between southeastern Turkey, northeast Syria, and parts of northern Iraq.1 Often known as the cradle of civilization, it was once a center of culture and learning throughout antiquity and the medieval period. Today, old Mardin’s limestone streets are alive with an ancient spirit and sacredness attesting to the many civilizations which have traversed them. It is the city of languages, where you may hear Turkish, Arabic, Kurdish, and Syriac within a half-mile walk. It is painful to consider how the lands of the Jazira, bound by the Turkish-Syrian border, mirror one another through shared history, but have now been fragmented by war and division rooted in colonial designs and geopolitical strategy. At one time, Turkish cities such as Aintab, Urfa, Diyarbakir, and Mardin were bound to the Syrian cities of Aleppo, Deir Ezzor, and cities further south in the Levant by active trade routes. These were hubs built out of diverse societies and commerce as caravanserai2 and souks connected to the Euphrates and beyond. This contrasts starkly with the carved-up and partitioned Syrian-Turkish border as we know it today.
Mardin, the fortress city with cascading limestone streets. Photo courtesy of Mia Shouha.
Just across the border of Mardin, in Syria, lies the ancient city of Aleppo. The very mention of the word Aleppo elicits a particular reaction among many due to the ongoing Syrian war since 2011. Images of destruction, displacement, bombs, and mortars in a divided and besieged killing field dominate the minds of most when the word is invoked. But for others, Aleppo represents home. The remnants of the old city, the winding stone souks, and historic buildings– such as the illustrious Baron Hotel and the Khan Al-Wazir caravanserai, all attest to its former place as a crucial destination for merchants, travelers, and missionaries en route between Asia and the Mediterranean. Its aching arms would warmly embrace Armenians and Assyrians who fled persecution during the 1915 genocide perpetrated by the Young Turks-led regime of the Ottoman Empire. For many, Aleppo is a window into a now-forgotten past, a place of refuge, and a museum of a region less fractured once upon a time.
The cities of Aleppo and Mardin represent two sides of a border region with memories of a once-connected past.
Map of Jazira showing late Ottoman-era provincial divisions and post Sykes-Picot borders. Designed by Meredith Sadler for Samuel Dolbee’s book Locusts of Power (used with permission).
Aleppo, Mardin, and the dawn of modernity
Just southeast of Mardin lies the Deyrulzafaran Monastery, also known as Mor Hananyo in Syriac. It overlooks the Jazira plains towards the Syrian border in the Syriac cultural region of Tur Abdin, a plateau dotted with Syriac villages that stretch towards the Turkish-Iraqi border, where they connect with the Assyrian Christian communities in Iraq. The languages spoken there consist less of Turkish and more Syriac and Arabic. The monastery hosted the headquarters of the Syriac Orthodox Church from 1160 until 1932 and was built over the ruins of a 4,500 BC temple dedicated to the Mesopotamian sun god Shamash, once worshiped across the region of former Mesopotamia. Despite its conversion from a pagan temple to a monotheistic monastery, the Deyrulzafaran monastery maintains some tribute to the pagan deity with 365 separate rooms, one for each day of the Earth’s cycle around the sun.
Deyrulzafaran Monastery, overlooking the Jazira plains and the Syrian border. Photo courtesy of Mia Shouha.
Courtyard of the Deyrulzafaran Monastery. Photo courtesy of Mia Shouha.
Aside from the proximity, shared languages, and history, further hints of connections to Syria remain. The monastery historically printed books in Arabic, Syriac, and Turkish using a printing press purchased from England in 1874 and sent to Mardin via Aleppo. Entering the upstairs chapel, one finds a second altar with wall embellishments in Syriac. There lies an old curtain inscribed with biblical narratives of Jesus’ life and death, which was once used for the main church of the monastery. The old curtain was, in fact, crafted in Aleppo and brought to Mardin for worshipers. These artifacts embody crucial links that Mardin and the larger Jazira once had with Aleppo.
Curtain inscribed with biblical narratives of Jesus’s life, crafted in Aleppo and sent to the Deyrulzafaran Monastery for worshippers. Photo courtesy of Mia Shouha.
Though frequently viewed today in relation to other cities in the Levant, Aleppo occupied quite a different place economically and spatially in the 16th and 17th centuries under Ottoman rule. Damascus and Beirut were more than a week away by caravan, on roads far less connected than those we know today. Since Aleppo was part of a separate Eyalet that included cities to its north like Aintab and Killis, local weights, measurements, and prices distinguished it from the rest of the Levant. Craftsmanship formed the largest sector of its output, and it had a dominant trading position between Asia and Europe thanks to its role as an intermediary for bargain and exchange. Orientalist writers often overly credited Europe for Aleppo’s wealth, pointing to the various European consulates erected in Aleppo during this earlier period. In reality, Europe was only marginal to this story of wealth accumulation. Indeed, Aleppo’s production of luxury fabrics thrived primarily thanks to caravans carrying silk from Iran that traveled through trade routes that linked cities in the Jazira.
The Ottoman-era explorer Evliya Çelebi mentions how Mardin carried extra importance in the passage of silk since it sat directly on the Aleppo route. Ottoman archives from this period detailing Jazira’s exportable foods noted how Mardin was particularly known for producing prunes and other tree-borne fruits, as well as nuts and honey, which enriched Aleppo’s famous cuisine, such as in the dish Kibbeh Safarjaliyeh featuring quince and Kebab Karaz featuring cherries. Mardin was also renowned for producing mohair wool taken from the Angora goats of the Jazira plain. But most important was none other than Jazira’s prized gallnut, which was used to make ink and dye and formed a key basis for this resilient economic relationship. It grows on the leaves of oak trees that dot the landscape. Camel hair and skin from the Euphrates valley were also crucial to Aleppo’s production of leather products. Peppers and spices from as far as South and East Asia likewise passed through these same corridors.
Due to the flood of New World silver from Spain’s Atlantic colonies, the global price of commodities skyrocketed in the late 17th century. This led to major shifts in the rhythms of regional commerce, to which both Aleppo and the Jazira adapted remarkably. At the beginning of the 18th century, as a result of new English and Dutch joint-stock companies circumventing the Levant’s commercial corridors, the arrival of spices virtually ceased. Likewise, imperial wars between the Ottoman and Russian empires decimated Iran’s silk industry in 1722. Aleppo was able to swiftly adjust sources for silk from Antioch, Lebanon, and other places, highlighting the resilience of its silk industry and hinting at a reorientation towards the Levant. Trade relations with the Jazira remained resilient, however, thanks to the continued flow of Mardin’s gallnuts for dye. Though less prized than its Iranian counterpart, Syrian silk produce benefited from an uptick in European demand in the later 18th century, which expanded the city’s economic ties with the Jazira region.
In the year 1756, a particularly harsh winter decimated food production in Aleppo’s surrounding hinterlands and the Jazira was similarly affected. Local notables increasingly acted like capitalists and exacerbated crises such as the subsequent famine of 1757 by siphoning off considerable wealth through rents, interests, and withheld grain to profit from artificial shortages. Predatory moneylenders also trapped countless rural peasants in obscene levels of debt, leading them to abandon their fields. To alleviate the crisis, imperial and provincial authorities resettled Aleppo’s hinterlands with peasants and semi-nomadic tribes of often Turkmen and Kurdish origin from the Jazira region. Thus, the face of the region changed in response to this crisis, and these influences from the Jazira inevitably affected Aleppo’s culture, dialect, and diverse cuisine. Local industries persisted, however, as European merchants, though protected by certain extraterritorial rights granted in diplomatic treaties, still had to compete with local merchants, who generally won out, indicating that its economy had not yet become peripheral the way it would begin to in the 19th century.
Mar Hirmiz Chaldean Church in Mardin. Photo courtesy of Mia Shouha.
A region reconstituted
In the early months of 2020, the Mar Hirmiz Chaldean church opened its vaults and unearthed a neglected library of worldly manuscripts in several different languages ranging from Arabic to Latin, French, Italian and even Persian. The collection was sorted and indexed by a visiting historian and scholar in 2020, in the upstairs meeting room of the church. Even today, historical and archival work is valuable in uncovering links to Syria: For instance, one book made reference to Clement Joseph David, the Syriac Catholic Archbishop of Damascus from 1879 to 1890. Among this collection stood numerous books signed as belonging to members of the largest Chaldean families, including the Shouha family. One such book was an atlas belonging to a Lucy Shouha and seemingly listed some names of other family members on the front cover. Present among the collection was also a note written in French to the Audo family, the family of the current Chaldean bishop of Aleppo, from a Jean Shouha in 1930 from Deir Ezzor. The Church caretaker spoke fondly of how, before the war in Syria, despite the existence of the border, they easily traveled to Aleppo by car. Today, the few plausible ways to get from Aleppo to Mardin are by flying to Istanbul via Beirut and continuing by road or plane.
Book on Clément Joseph David, Syriac Catholic Archbishop of Damascus (1879-1890), with his photograph and contributions. Photo courtesy of Mia Shouha.
Lucy Shouha’s Atlas de la Géographie (1830), with family names on the cover. Photo courtesy of Mia Shouha.
Note in French by Jean Shouha to the Audo family, written in 1930. Photo courtesy of Mia Shouha.
The 19th-century Ottoman Empire implemented a series of reforms known as the Tanzimat during an era of heightened European encroachment. They consisted of the legalization of private property, new structures of provincial and imperial administration modeled off European powers, and guaranteed formal equality and citizenship rights to Muslims and non-Muslims alike. They also unintentionally intensified the Empire’s emerging status as an economic periphery by opening it up more to European capitalist investment. Cheap manufactured imports from Europe flooded Aleppo’s markets, while exports from the Ottoman Empire consisted of raw commodities for an increasingly industrialized Europe. Aleppo’s hinterlands declined after the boom years of its cotton exports during the American Civil War, while European companies began to build railways across the Empire. Power further slipped to Europe when the Ottoman Debt Administration was formed in 1881 so that the Ottoman Empire could pay off its massive debts to subsidize the railway construction for European companies.
In Jazira, authorities repeatedly shifted the administrative frontiers to “contain” mobile populations and resettle Bedouin and Kurdish nomads. Collecting revenue from such groups who frequently disregarded borders proved to be a challenge. Against the backdrop of these new enclosures and spatial formations, notables in Mardin petitioned their city to be detached from Diyarbakir to unite with the district of Zor (centered on Deir Ezzor) further south in modern-day Syria. They justified this by pointing out how Mardin’s most commonly spoken language was a dialect of Arabic, as opposed to Kurdish or Ottoman Turkish, as was more the case in northern Diyarbakir province. This never materialized. Moreover, violence in the name of Turkish Islamism and nationalism towards Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek populations also accompanied the dwindling Ottoman Empire. Such cases included the Hamidian Massacres of 1894-96 and the Armenian Genocide from 1915 to 1924.3 It is estimated that the Christian population of Turkey went from roughly 20 percent in 1874 to roughly two percent by 1924. During the Armenian genocide, in particular, Deir Ezzor and Ras Al Ayn in the Jazira became prime cities for the deportation of Armenians and Assyrians for slaughter. During these decades, South Turkish cities, including Mardin, were ethnically cleansed and largely drained of their historic Christian populations. The cultural and economic vibrancy of the region contracted, with one example being the near destruction of Diyarbakir province’s weaving industry through the death and displacement of Armenians who dominated the craft.
With the Ottoman Empire’s defeat in World War I and the implementation of the Sykes-Picot agreement, Mardin and Aleppo both came under France’s spheres of colonial control. It was during this period that Aleppo would reorient its identity and contacts towards its would-be sister cities in the south, forming a major center of Syrian nationalist activity.4 The Treaty of Lausanne solidified this in 1923, which led to a new Syrian-Turkish border being drawn, cutting the Jazira in half and severing the direct ties between Mardin and Aleppo for good. The Treaty also granted the nascent Turkish state amnesty for the ethnic cleansing perpetrated against ethnic minorities in its creation. Armenian and Assyrian survivors and orphans who settled in Aleppo, many of whom hail from Mardin and other cities in the Jazira, were forbidden from returning. Railroads of the late Ottoman era, such as the German-owned Konya-Baghdad railway, which sought to link Mardin with Aleppo, slowly became seldomly used relics, heavily dependent on the often hostile relations between the three countries they passed through.5 The peripheralization and division of the Jazira, from both its Syrian and Turkish sides, had been complete.
Ancestral memory in the present
Standing atop the roofs of Mardin today, the view of the vast lowlands expanding towards the Syrian border and beyond makes the horrors of war seem worlds away. Old Mardin today is relatively unknown, a captivating sight for tourists but a shell of its historical past, due to gradual waves of economic peripheralization and regional fragmentation for the sake of asserting geopolitical and nationalist interests. Similarly, the Aleppo of Modern Syria became disconnected from its sister cities in the Jazira. Communities displaced through state border formation, including Assyrians and Armenians, also experienced a clash between the historic violence and exile from the Jazira and newer violence and displacement of the current war in Syria. Few look back to the historic ties, as despite the regional proximity, these memories have made way for the needs of present-day survival. In the post-war landscape of Aleppo, attempts to preserve these communities’ legacies could be realized through reconnection with cities across the border. Yet these efforts face challenges, as Syria’s political landscape remains divided and left to the mercy of an increasingly aggressive Turkish occupation in the north.
Despite these patterns of ongoing dispossession, the legacy of these regional ties occasionally reemerges, such as in re-recordings of folk songs like “Jirane Halla Halla”, sung by artists like Syrian-Kurdish musician Ari Jan: “On the road to Jazira, I jumped off the train. On the road to Damascus, I jumped off the train.” Thus, the memory of this connection lives on, even if only through romanticism and idealistic longing for regional unity.
1Jazira in Arabic translates to “island” or “peninsula” and reflects how the region is surrounded by various bodies of water. It should not be confused with the Arabian Peninsula, which is likewise named “Arabic Jazira” or Al-Jazira Al-ʿArabiyya in Arabic. For the sake of clarity, the Jazira is often called “Syrian Jazira” or Al-Jazira Al-Suriyya in Arabic to avoid confusion with the larger peninsula.
2Caravanserais were roadside inns along major trade routes like the ancient Silk Road. They served as hubs for the exchange of goods, ideas, and culture.
3By 2016, Turkey’s population, according to official data, was 99.8 percent Muslim due to lower Christian birthrates and, more importantly, steady Christian emigration, especially after the anti-Greek pogrom in Istanbul in 1955 (See Speros Vyronis, The Mechanism of Catastrophe, 2005).
4According to Philip Khoury, the emergence of Syrian nationalist sentiment and identity in Aleppo alongside the other “core” Syrian cities – Hama, Homs, and Damascus – came about mostly hanks to increased contacts between urban populations of these cities, the Arab notable classes in particular, first in response to late Ottoman Turkish-centric nationalism, then French colonization.
5The Baghdad railway was one of many railways planned during the late Ottoman Empire and remained unfinished after the Empire’s collapse. The Turkish-Syria border was demarcated largely in reference to the railway, which snakes alongside it in parallel. The railway sits mostly on the Turkish side of the border, but dips into Syrian territory at the town of Al-Rai towards Aleppo, before returning north again in the direction of Konya to the Northwest. For more information, see Sean McMeekin, The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, (Belknap Press, 2012).
Mia Shouha
Mia Shouha is a Syrian-Australian emerging writer from Sydney. She is a PhD researcher in Political Economy and Anthropology with an Honors degree in Political, Economic, and Social Sciences from the University of Sydney. Mia’scurrent research explores the anthropology of crisis in Lebanon and Syria, focusing on their economic development, power struggles, sanctions, and recent agricultural, environmental, and industrial histories.She recently completed the 2024 StoryCasters writing mentorship and has been published by Afikra’s Daftar Journal, the Journal of Australian Political Economy, and Aniko Press.
Marco Roberts
Marco Roberts is an emerging writer and scholar based in Philadelphia and Seattle. He is pursuing his honors BA in History at Swarthmore College, with a focus on the history of capitalism, colonialism, and nationalism in West Asia. He’s particularly interested in the political economy of communal identity and violence, historicizing movements of sectarianism and anti-sectarianism in the Mashriq, as well as the political and agricultural history of the Jazira region. Marco is half Chinese from his mother’s side and grew up in Beijing for most of his life. His background has also led him to take an interest in China’s historical and current geopolitical role in the region as well. His writings have appeared in Swarthmore’s campus newspaper,the Swarthmore Phoenix.
